Campbell County authorities arrested a Liberty University student for having several homemade bombs in his car.

The student, 19-year-old Mark D. Uhl of Amissville, Va., reportedly told authorities that he was making the bombs to stop protesters from disrupting the funeral service.

Seriously, this kid is an indication of how dangerous the rhetoric of the religious right really is. This religious right terrorist wasn't just some nutjob in some far away land, he was one of Jerry's kids. And he was apparently ready to kill for Falwell and his message of intolerance. Who else is willing to kill for the religious right hate speech?

Its interesting how ABC caught this story and is properly showing how crazy the Religious Reich are. But I'm having doubts, I have a nasty suspicion that this jerkwad is going to slip through the legal system and not got to jail, but instead somehow winds up in a asylum and then is released early because he's a good Christian.

I think I'll be keeping an eye on this psycho and maybe law enforcement should begin to investigate his friends to see if there are anymore "special people" like him at Liberty. If they're lucky they can catch a few future abortion clinic bombers before they get out into the general public.

It's a small thing, but still significant. The Miami Herald reports that the "Center for Reclaiming America" has closed its doors.

Bringing an end to ambitious goals that included raising $2 million to launch a Capitol Hill lobbying arm, opening a dozen regional offices and recruiting activists in all 435 congressional districts, the Fort Lauderdale-based Center for Reclaiming America has shut its doors.

The conservative organization, part of the Rev. James D. Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries, let its eight employees go last week. Coral Ridge also closed its Capitol Hill-based Center for Christian Statesmanship, founded in 1995 to convert lawmakers to evangelical Christianity.

Brian Fisher, executive vice president at Coral Ridge Ministries, said the closings are part of a larger effort to redefine the ministry's mission.

''We believe that by streamlining the operations we will be able to return to our core focus,'' he said.

Could there be an actual backlash growing against such organizations? It's very possible.

David Kuo (the deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives from 2001 to 2003, and the author of “Tempting Faith”) has an op-ed in today's New York Times. He quotes John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute:

Modern Christianity, having lost sight of Christ’s teachings, has been co-opted by legalism, materialism and politics. Simply put, it has lost its spirituality. [...] Whereas Christianity was once synonymous with charity, compassion and love for one’s neighbor, today it is more often equated with partisan politics, anti-homosexual rhetoric and affluent mega-churches.

And:

Evangelicals are beginning to see the effect of their political involvement on those with whom they hope to share Jesus’ eternal message: non-evangelicals. Tellingly, Beliefnet’s poll showed that nearly 60 percent of non-evangelicals have a more negative view of Jesus because of Christian political involvement; almost 40 percent believe that George W. Bush’s faith has had a negative impact on his presidency.

One can but hope...Dominionism is as much a corruption of evangelical Christianity as "abstinence-only" sex ed and clinic bombers.

Feb. 6, 2006 issue - When you believe the end of the world is coming, you learn to talk fast. On a Friday afternoon the debate team from Liberty University, Jerry Falwell's fundamentalist Baptist college, is madly rehearsing for the tournament about to begin. This year's topic: should the United States increase diplomatic and economic pressure on China. They may just be practicing, but you wouldn't know it from the menacing mosquito-buzz rising as all 20 debaters read their speeches at once, as fast as they can. Policy debate on the college level has become a rapid-fire verbal assault, an arguments-per-minute game, that sounds more like the guy at the end of the car commercial than an eloquent Oxford intellectual. There is tension and more than a little spittle in the air. The Liberty team is currently ranked No. 1 in the country, above Harvard (14th) and all the other big names. But for the evangelicals, there's a lot more at stake than a trophy. Falwell and the religious right figure that if they can raise a generation that knows how to argue, they can stem the tide of sin in the country. Seventy-five percent of Liberty's debaters go on to be lawyers with an eye toward transforming society. "I think I can make an impact in the field of law on abortion and gay rights, to get back to Americans' godly heritage," says freshman debater Cole Bender.

They are the NO.1 RANKED DEBATING TEAM IN THE USA. If "liberals" secularists and memberso f other religious demonitations don't, we will be living in the land of the Handmaidens Tale....

What are the Religious Reich calling themselves these days? I'm looking for terms that the dominionist/AoG etc. would use to describe themselves/their movement. Not the terms which we know them (Dominionist, Theocratic, etc.)

Poor Dobson. The Khristian Right's Agenda hasn't borne fruit:From Media Matters,blockquote>Dobson: Republican majority has "very little" to show for "pro-family, pro-moral" agenda; Santorum pushed marriage amendment in responseSummary: On his radio program, James Dobson complained that the Republican Party has "very little ... to show for it" in terms of accomplishing the goals of "the pro-family agenda, the pro-moral agenda, [and] the sanctity of life." In response, Sen. Rick Santorum expressed his desire for Congress to vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment, describing the amendment's purpose as "protecting marriage ... between one man and one woman."</blockquote>

Poor babies. That's what they get for selling their soul(s) for the Whole World - It profited them not a whit. Oh,and thier is audio.

For the record this is the same moron that had the Office of Technological Assessment shut down as supposed part of cutting governmental spending (which is was actual as part of the Fundamentalist movement to put a leash on science and evolution).

Science and evolution are the things that Religious Reich and Dominionist despise as it challenges/questions biblical ideology and intelligent free-thinking is needed to pursue science which is contridictory to simple-mindness/blind obedience of the masses.

I find bitter irony in Gingrich's statement:

With America's economic dominance threatened, Newt Gingrich, the brainy former speaker of the House of Representatives, argues, "science and technology are at the heart of our survival." President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, Gingrich continues, is "nutty." Instead, he says, kids should be paid cold, hard cash for excelling in math and science; prescription drugs, meanwhile, should be available on websites like Travelocity.com, where shoppers can compare prices before they buy.

Ok, with all due respect Mr. (Former) Speaker of the House, Aren't you the same idiot that shut down the OTA?

While he is currently pandering to the masses and middle America, especially those hurt by the economic impacts that Shrub has caused after going off to an illegal and unjust war. I'll note that if the OTA had not been shut down and been still running for the last 10 years, as an independent group of scientists and a bipartisan panel, Shrub would have found it ten-twenty times harder to justify the Iraqi War as the WMDs and yellow-cake urianium was never real to begin with.

Reading futher on I see thru alot of his bullshit ideological values which are suppose to make for an appealing presidental canidate, especially after all the problems Bush 2.0 and his thugs have inflicted on the America sheeple and the rest of the planet.

Gingrich has plenty of ideas in his current role as consultant and policy wonk. Winning the Future focuses on issues that Gingrich believes threaten America's dominance. Like what, you ask? Liberal secularism, terrorism, inefficient bureaucracy, and poor math and science education. Gingrich's goal is nothing less than "creating a 21st-century, intelligent, effective government."

After looking this statement over I see his attempt to please the Religious Reich crowd with this paragraph, Liberal Secularism.

Excuse me! Professor if you read history as you have the damn degree in the United State was founded on secularism. Moron!

Additionally he talks about creating an intelligent government, the government is already intelligent. The problem is there is no common sense among the college educated retards that are running the country into the ground, instead they are kissing the collective asses of the big businesses (like Wally-Mart, the Oil Baronies and other Mega Corpses) which is bleeding the populace dry of there life and money.

While he was the South Republican Poster Boy back in the 80s-90s, it amazes me that his head is so far up his asshole that he can see the real world thru the shit-stained lenses of his.

If you look back at his track record of screw ups and sell outs its amazing that we aren't farther along the road to Dominonist rule.

The revelation that a senior White House official "cleared" the since-failed nomination of Harriet Meyers to the Supreme Court with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson reminded me of the huge controversy caused by John Kennedy's campaign for president in 1960. Then it was the religious conservatives who were up in arms about the separation of church and state and about preventing "the Pope from taking over the White House."Can you imagine their reaction if, in 1961 when President Kennedy nominated Byron White to the Supreme Court, Ted Sorenson had placed a call to the Pope to seek his approval of the White nomination?Reflections such as this in the context of today's political rhetoric of "faith" and "values", and the high-jacking of the Republican party by the religious right, together with my own evangelical background and divinity school studies of theology, caused me to write God and Caesar in America: And Essay on Religion and Politics.

Here's a quote from his book:

The full agenda of religious right "values"--laissez-faire economics, antigovernment biases, neo-conservative foreign policies, and rightist orthodoxy--requires a judiciary compliant with it. It does no good to convert a Jeffersonian public school system into private parochial schools, to make churches the instruments of the state by transferring public funds from social programs to them, to pass laws restricting reproductive rights, to expand law enforcement's intrusive reach in the name of security, or to torture or indefinitely detain terror suspects if a judge or court from the pre-revivalist past overturns those actions on constitutional grounds. The full religious revolution cannot be realized without a federal judiciary, up to and including at least five members of the Supreme Court, that shares those ideals and goals.

I have some questions--I don't want anyone to think I am being disingenuous here, I really want opinions and, if possible, links to anything that might shed light upon my questions.

dogemperor, you have been so very helpful as well as forthcoming regarding your upbringing and what you had to endure, as have others on this extremely informative and erudite group.

Anyway, here goes--these leaders of dominionist groups, Jim Dobson, Ted Haggerd, Jerry Falwell, etc.--what's the real story on them personally? Do they really believe what they are selling or are they in it for the power/money? Are there sources for first hand accounts of what these people are really like?

What about the pastors or whatever they call themselves that some of you are personally acquainted with?

But imagining that red-state voters will turn blue if only Democrats talk more about faith misunderstands the role of conservative evangelical Christianity in American politics. Conservative evangelical churches played a big role in delivering voters for George W. Bush in 2004 — but neither that nor Kaine's victory prove that red-state voters are simply hungry for "religion" and will reward whichever candidate speaks most convincingly about his or her personal faith.

Conservative evangelical churches were able to deliver voters for Bush in much the same way, and for much the same reasons, that labor unions and political machines like New York's Tammany Hall were once able to deliver votes for the Democrats: They offer material benefits to people with nowhere else to turn, and that is easily parlayed into votes at election time.

I was just perusing Wikipedia. (I am unable to leave the FGBMFI group because of its wealth and power, and clearly stealth theocratic ambitions) and went to the latter rain movement founder William Branham. He ends up being considered an important influence in the FGBMFI group. But I noticed the Branham prophecies and thought they were interesting:

1. "Franklin D. Roosevelt will run four terms and take America into a second world war. 2. "The dictator that's now arising in Italy will come into power, Ethiopia will fall. He'll come to a shameful end. 3. "The women has been permitted to vote. And in voting, someday they'll elect the wrong man. 4. "Our war will be with Germany, and they will build a great big concrete place and fortify themselves in there, and the Americans will take a horrible beating. 5. "Science will progress in such a way until they will make a car that will not have to be guided by a steering wheel, and the cars will continue to be shaped like an egg until the consummation 6. "I saw a great woman stand up, beautiful looking, dressed in real highly royals like purple, and I got little parenthesis down here, 'She was a great ruler in the United States, perhaps the Catholic church' 7. "I saw this United States burning like a smolder; rocks had been blowed up. And it was burning like a--a heap of fire in logs or something that just set it afire; and looked as far as I could see and she'd been blown up.[2]

What I find fascinating is #6 in relation to the Supreme Court. I have been trying to figure why - given the open and bigoted anti-catholic statements made by the RR-

Romanism is a pagan counterfeit of the Christian religion, ancient paganism and idolatry, claiming to be the church which Christ founded…The Roman Church is not another Chirsitian denomination. It is a satanic counterfeit…”Bob Jones Jr., referring to the Catholic Church, FAITH for the Family, 1991, Bob Jones University